Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [176]
After reviewing the evidence at the police department, Stidham promptly filed a motion with Judge Burnett. The lawyer said that he wanted to retest several items, including the knife with blood in its fold that had belonged to John Mark Byers. “Additional testing with newer, more sensitive, and more discriminating tests,” Stidham wrote, “may help resolve previously inconclusive test results….”
When Prosecutor Davis objected to having the evidence retested, Stidham wrote to Burnett again. Reminding Burnett of the new state law that allowed inmates to seek retesting of evidence that might exonerate them, Stidham asked for a hearing on his motion. Burnett did not respond.
Arguments at the Supreme Court
Nearly two years after Judge Burnett’s denial of Damien’s Rule 37 petition, the Arkansas Supreme Court scheduled a hearing on Mallett’s appeal. The Web site buzzed: Mallett had requested and the high court had agreed to hear oral arguments. They would be held on March 15, 2001, at the Arkansas Justice Building, on the grounds of the state capitol in Little Rock. Many supporters saw the event as an opportunity to again display their concerns about the case in the state where it had unfolded. Dozens of “WM3” supporters made plans to attend.
The day dawned cold and overcast. The chamber was packed to standing room only as Mallett and a lawyer for the Arkansas attorney general’s office made their brief presentations.411Standing before the seven robed justices, Mallett reiterated many of the points he’d argued in his petition to Judge Burnett. Again, he stressed the conflict of interest he asserted Damien’s lawyers had created by involving Damien in the documentary. Then Mallett added another complaint, this one aimed specifically at Judge Burnett. Mallett told the justices that in Judge Burnett’s cursory ruling denying Damien’s petition, he had failed to address each point the defense attorneys had raised, and so he had not offered his “findings of fact and conclusions of law” as Arkansas’s Rule 37 required. Instead, Burnett had addressed only a few of the defense lawyer’s points. He had ignored others entirely. And the rest he had simply dismissed with a few broad strokes. An attorney for the state argued that Burnett’s responses were sufficient and that to now send the issue back to the judge for a more detailed order would do “gross injustice to the issue of finality.”
It was over in less than an hour. Outside, as reporters gathered around Mallett, the West Memphis Three supporters began to unfurl a banner across the front of the Justice Building. While television cameras panned the colorful 160-foot display, one of the Web site’s founders explained that it had been created from some three thousand postcards sent by the inmates’ supporters from around the world.
Reporters asked what the supporters thought they could accomplish with their demonstration. Did they expect to influence the justices? An answer appeared that night on the Web site. “Instead of becoming discouraged, and feeling powerless against the justice system,” the site’s cofounder wrote, “it seems that a good number of people are still hopeful enough to believe that their support and their efforts can really bring about a change for the better.” Mallett offered a more lawyerly reaction. “A naivete runs through American culture that assumes ‘if I make a lot of noise, judicial behavior will be affected,’” he later told a reporter.412However, he added, “I don’t think judges are favorably affected by young people’s groups and websites.”
A month after the oral arguments, the justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court issued their ruling. Without addressing